


Dragonslayer

by pprfaith



Series: Author's Favourites [12]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Apocalypse, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Dragons, Growing Up, Language, Little plot, M/M, Purple Prose, Weirdness, What am I doing?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 15:32:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are dragons in the world. It only matters from certain angles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragonslayer

**Author's Note:**

> A few days ago, I said on my livejournal that I found a mostly finished PR fic I'd forgotten I'd written. Today, I found a finished PR fic I'd also forgotten I'd written. I'm starting to worry about my mental faculties.
> 
> Unbetaed and weird, for which I am not sorry.

+

(In a city somewhere between Knifehead and the end of the world, Raleigh Becket walks down a street with his hands tucked deeply into his pockets, chin pulled in against the endless rain.

Up ahead there is a bridge arcing into the sky and below it, in the shadows, someone moves with great, sweeping motions. He steps out of the rain and into the gloom, finds a kid with baggy pants tagging something onto a wall.

He hears Raleigh move, startles, runs off with a can of red spray paint in his hands, leaving the former pilot alone with a line of bad graffiti. 

_This is no age for dragons_ , it read, once, not too long ago, in blocky white letters.

 _Dragons_ is crossed out in red. Above it, the kid scribbled _humans_ instead.

Raleigh throws his head back and laughs and laughs and laughs.)

+

Chuck Hansen isn’t a child of the war, but he might as well be.

He was ten when K-Day hit and he remembers sitting glued to his mom’s side, staring at the TV with something approaching glee because this couldn’t possibly be real. It was just a really cool movie.

Until it fucking wasn’t anymore. Dragons were real, and wasn’t that a hoot and a half.

He was ten that day, which gives him what, five, six years of memories of life before the monsters came? In the grand scheme of things, it’s not really all that much. Actually, it’s damn pitiful. 

In his head, he has two drawers of memories of those years, neatly labelled. 

One of them is “Dad”. 

In it are memories of fatigues to press his face into when he was a little snot, the smell of cordite and gunpowder, of blood and hospitals, where he sat, waiting for Dad to be released with yet another injury. The old man collects scars like stamps and always has.

There’s war stories, in that box, told by a man who looks a little like him as he is now, all grown up in daddy’s image. 

Herc never figured out how to talk to his only son, so he tended to talk to him like he would an adult and continuously forgot to tone down the blood and gore of his stories to an age appropriate level.

“Dad” might as well be labelled “War”, long before K-Day ever came.

The second drawer has “Mom” scrawled across it in childish handwriting and inside are almost all of Chuck’s happy memories. 

Baking together, going on day trips around town, higher, higher on the swing, lullabies and bedtime stories.

Angela’s favourite stories were the ones where the noble knight slays the evil dragon. Chuck was always fascinated by dragons, huge and ancient and powerful. When he was eight, he wanted to be a fireman, because dragons spit fire and he wanted to be a modern day dragonslayer.

“Remember, darling,” mom used to say when she tucked him in after a story, “dragons can be killed.”

He knows now that she was quoting some dead, old, British fart, but back then, it always seemed the wisest thing he’d ever heard. Dragons can be killed, damsels can be saved and the world can be a good place. 

And he was totally going to kick dragon ass.

Then. That day, sitting in front of the TV and watching something huge and scaled and vicious rip apart an entire city like it was made of paper.

Kaiju’s aren’t dragons, but the comparison is too damn close and at the age of ten, he sat there with the slow dawning realization that this was real, that monsters were real, and that nothing the humans could throw at it would kill this particular beast.

The dragons were back. 

+

Here’s something you should probably know before he goes on:

Dragons were real, once. 

Before the Kaiju came and took over the title of monster, there were real, actual dragons in the world.

There are skeletons and eye-witness accounts and shit, and it was probably horrible, living with the knowledge that monsters like that existed, that they could come to your village and eat your children at the drop of a hat– which, wow, he so doesn’t have to imagine what that feels like, he already bloody well knows.

When he was a child, Chuck Hansen wanted to slay dragons.

And then the real monsters came and Chuck sat next to his mother, glued to the TV screen and thought, maybe there never were any dragons. 

Maybe there were only ever Kaiju.

+

After K-Day, he never let his mother read him another dragon story.

He regrets it, now, that he screamed at her until she put the books away because those few months between K-Day and the Sidney attack were the last he had with her. If he’d known, he would have let her read him a million stories, just to hear the sound of her voice a little longer. 

But life doesn’t work like that.

Dad stayed with him for half a year, after (after Sidney, which stopped being a city and became a name, a title, a gravemarker for thousands of people that remain unburied to this day), silent and grieving and not knowing what to do with an obstinate ten-year-old who had no fucking idea how to articulate his rage against a world where dragons existed and killed mothers, where fathers were knights in literal fucking armour and still couldn’t slay them fast enough to save anyone that mattered. 

Herc drank too much in the evenings, looked painfully sober in the mornings and finally settled back into his old habit of telling war stories without editing them. This time, though, Chuck listened closely, as closely as he could because he was going to grow up, and fuck being a fireman, he was going to kill every fucking monster out there in his mom’s name.

Every single fucking one. 

In hindsight, Herc knew exactly the damage he was doing, telling an angry child about blood and death and destruction, but he had no clue what else to do, so he ran with it. 

(His wife would have hated him, but his wife was dead.)

+

Sometimes, Chuck dreams of water and fire and scales the colour of the sunset, bright golden and deep red.

He dreams of a voice so deep it shakes the earth and the smooth slide of reptile bodies through water.

Chuck tastes blood in those dreams, and victory. 

+

When the six month grace (grief) period was over Chuck got dumped with Grandma and Gramps on their farm while Daddy went back out to slay the monsters in his skyscraper metal armour. 

Chuck spent most of his days sulking in the attic, refusing to speak. One day, he came across a trunk full of his mother’s things and, at the very bottom, was an old, tea-stained copy of her favourite book, the one she used to read to him, doing all the voices just right.

He read it, cover to cover, a dozen times, until he was sure he’d never forget the stories again, not ever, and then he burned it in the yard.

He got grounded for a week for that stunt, because the hedge caught fire and almost burned down the entire farm. 

+

Herc tried to come home at least once every quarter. When he couldn’t, he found a way to have his son flown in for a few weeks and so, by the time he was twelve, Chuck was an old hat at navigating Shatterdomes, climbing scaffoldings and hiding amidst the chaos.

Maybe it was because his grandparents were so old and so bitter against his father, but the ‘domes felt more like home than the farm ever did. 

He guesses that was a bit prophetic. (He still dreams of water and fire.)

When the constant noise got to him, he grabbed his backpack and disappeared into the rafters above Striker’s head. Last place the old man went looking for him, for some reason Chuck never bloody figured out because _where else would have have gone_ , if not there?

From his perch he noticed, distractedly, as his absence was noted and Herc started stirring up people to search for him. Petulant little shit that he was, he didn’t care that his father was almost frantic with worry over his son being MIA.

If Dad wanted him close by, he should maybe check in on him more than once a fucking day.

They repeated the exercise at least once a week, every time Chuck was visiting Herc instead of the other way around. He hid, everyone searched. It was never the old man who found him.

One particular day, it was Sasha who came swinging up the scaffolding, too nimble for her solid frame.

He likes Sasha, then and now, because the woman’s kind of badass, while still having something soft about her. She reminds him of a more take-charge version of his mom, not that he’s ever going to tell her that. 

She sat next to him, legs dangling and asked, “What are you drawing?”

“Dragons,” he answered before realizing what a little-kid answer that was and scowled fiercely, trying to shove the sheets he’d been sketching on out of sight.

But Sasha’s quick for being so tall and grabbed them from him. He let her, but only because you don’t hit girls, or something like that. That’s an excuse, but he’s sticking to it, even today. 

“You want to kill dragons?” she asked after a minute, her accent sharp and soothing as always.

He nodded. “With a Jaeger. Imma have my own.”

She laughed and he was about to rip that paper from her hands and run away when she put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head, suddenly conspiratorially . “Haven’s you been told? You do not kill a dragon with weapons. Only fire can kill a dragon.”

Then she ruffled his hair and took him down to the caf for some grub and he never quite figured out if she was taking the piss or not. 

+

Here’s something he’s never told anyone about that day:

When Sasha winked at him as she dropped him off at his dad’s room, her eyes flashed bright yellow.

+

Before the end of the end, he met the Beckets, just once. 

They knew his dad from the second battle of Manila and it was all back-slapping and horsing around and Chuck rolled his eyes so hard. Right up until he realized who those two idiots were.

There were posters all over his room on the farm, depicting Gipsy Danger, her pilots, her stats. 

The Beckets were the world’s new super heroes, successful, brilliant, good looking, smart. Everything any teenager around the globe could ever dream of growing up to be. 

It was through his dad that Chuck heard about the other side of the coin: how the two were constantly getting citations for running roughshod over orders, doing what they wanted and recklessly endangering themselves.

Dad claims, to this day, that those two gave Stacker half his grey hairs. The other half coming from Miss Mori, of course. 

But Chuck can still rattle off their stats even now, years later, and fact is, while Gipsy had the most recklessly dumb piloting duo that ever walked, they finished all five of their kills faster than any other Jaeger. 

They went in for the kill from go, no pussyfooting around, no hesitation. 

See a shot, take a shot, his old man says. The Beckets must have heard it, too, at some point, because their recklessness paid off. 

They were the best. 

(Until they weren’t anymore.)

And when they were done making small talk with his old man, they actually looked at Chuck.

“A bit young for a co-pilot,” Yancy joked.

“Like you weren’t still green,” Herc shot back, eyes on Raleigh. Nineteen at his first kill. Chuck planned to beat that and did, by three years, not soon after. It’s ironic, perhaps, but Chuck Hansen stepped into a Jaeger for the first time only three weeks after Yancy Becket did for the last.

“Shut up, Yance,” Raleigh stopped his brother. “Your kid right?”

Dad gave him a questioning look and Raleigh tapped the side of his nose like he could smell family relations or some such shit. 

“You gonna be a pilot, like your dad?” he asked.

Chuck shook his head, elbowed the old man in the gut. “Better,” he retorted, smirking. 

He was fifteen, a few months away from graduating top of his class and he had ego to spare. And getting in a dig against Herc was never a bad thing. Besides, he _was_ going to be better. He was going to be as good as the Beckets, reckless and brave and unpredictable.

You needed to be, to fight a fucking dragon and live to tell the tale.

“Good luck with that,” Raleigh said. Yancy waved, they took off back toward Gipsy because they were on a tight schedule. Chuck watched them go.

That was three months before Knifehead.

+

It’s not that Chuck hates Raleigh for anything he’s done. Not really. 

Sure, he was disappointed that his hero tucked tail and ran, but until his first Drift with the old man, it was just that. 

It was Herc’s memories that did him in, really. 

His dad knew the brothers before and he met Raleigh, briefly, after. 

Before Knifehead, the brothers were... magnetic, at least in Dad’s memories. They finished each other’s sentences, laughed before the jokes were finished, always orbited each other. They were legendarily bad at talking to LOCCENT during a Drift because they were linked deeply enough to communicate telepathically. The few times Herc met them, they were never more than ten feet apart if they could help it and they were so, so _alive_. 

As closely bound as any two human beings could be. As any pilot-pair could be. 

And then Raleigh, after. Small and fragile, damaged in his hospital bed, eyes sunken wrists strapped down. He was on fucking suicide watch.

He was broken. 

What makes Chuck so angry isn’t that his childhood hero ran the fuck away. What makes him so angry is that, if it could happen to the fucking Becket boys, it can happen to him and Dad and what then? 

His mother’s dead ten years, her books lost, her corpse never recovered and his father, awkward fuckhead that he is, is all that Chuck has, beside the damn dog. Without his old man, Chuck is just another war orphan, just a boy playing at being a dragonslayer, without a partner. Without the other half of his soul.

Chuck’s so fucking angry because he’s terrified of sharing the only surviving Becket’s fate.

+

The first kill of team Hansen was two hours of his life that Chuck only ever remembers in fragments and impressions.

Pain, adrenaline, exhaustion, exhilaration, copper in his mouth and sweat on his skin, the deafening banging of metal, the grinding of breaking steel, the wet sounds of tearing flesh.

Victory.

And then his father’s sweaty palms against his face, holding too tight, grinning in his face like a lunatic, whispering far too loudly, “You killed it, son. You killed the dragon.”

It felt like growing up.

If felt like an ending.

+

“We need him!” Pentecost shouted, three months ago, when the end started ending and it looked like they really were going to stop fighting in favour of a fucking _wall_. Something to _cower_ behind like terrified fucking _children_ while they waited for the dragons to burn the world.

“He’s broken!” Dad shouted back and Chuck leaned against the wall outside their bunk and pretended not to be eavesdropping. 

Chuck is very good at pretending all kinds of things. 

“He is one of the best pilots we have ever had. You have seen his stats.”

“That was before.”

“Raleigh Becket jockeyed Gipsy Danger for twenty-three minutes on his own and didn’t take any neural damage. He had a hole in his lungs, eight broken ribs and a fucked up shoulder while he did it and he never even faltered.”

“Yancy died while they were still linked.”

Chuck could almost see the Marshall shaking his head, rubbing a hand over his face. “And you know as well as I do that that is impossible. Yancy was alive when he was ripped out of the machines. Raleigh should not have felt that. There is no such thing as a ghost drift, no matter what people say. ”

“But Raleigh did feel it.”

Pentecost sounds satisfied when he says, “Exactly.”

+

The last dragon died eight hundred years ago.

Some of the cults claim that the Kaiju came to avenge their brethren, or that they are God’s way of punishing man for destroying the most magnificent of his creatures.

In most schools, the dragon wars have been struck from the curriculum. Children have enough nightmares without them. 

Chuck reads a newspaper article about the whole fuckery once and laughs until even the damn dog looks at him funny.

+

The Becket brothers’ files, stolen and hidden in a lockbox under Chuck’s bed, forgotten there in the wake of the end of the world, contain a list of impossible things.

The physical fitness of both brothers is off the charts. Their non-verbal communication is impossibly detailed and complete. Their Drift scores break the scale.

Which is probably why, Chuck thinks, the PPDC overlooked the absolute lack of details about their lives before the programme. There are no schools, no addresses, no former places of employment. It’s like the brothers didn’t exist until they set foot in the Academy, where they were moved to the fast track within two weeks.

Eleven months later, they were up in Gipsy’s Conn, killing monsters.

+

Chuck buys the jacket on a whim the first day in Hong Kong. 

It’s dark, the way clothes usually are these days, like people are afraid bright colours will attract Kaiju.

In one of his mom’s stories, the dragon stole the princess because she shimmered in the light like part of its hoard, a diamond clasped in gold.

The jacket is a dark, bluish grey. Stitched across the shoulders and back, in perfect, painstaking detail, is a dragon the colour of lava. It roars at the world, angry, vivid. 

There is a black sword stuck through its heart. 

Sasha sees him wearing it in the cafeteria and traces a hand along the edges of the image, a look like memory on her face. 

“You are a true slayer of dragons now, eh?” she asks, sitting down next to him. Aleksis follows after her, two trays in hand.

Chuck shrugs, embarrassed that someone remembers his childhood fantasies.

The three of them eat in silence for a while, until, suddenly, Sasha wants to know, “Do you think the dragons loved them?”

“Who?”

“The mortals they stole?” She looks at Chuck while she speaks, but her hand finds Aleksis’ on the table and squeezes.

“Does it matter? They died. Just like these fuckers will.”

All of a sudden, the proud, tall Russian looks impossibly sad. “Yes,” she agrees. 

Chuck flees, Max hot on his heels.

+

Sometimes, Chuck dreams of water and fire and scales, of dragons under water and in the air.

He dreams of blood in his mouth and death in his hands. He dreams of battle. 

One of the monsters curls around him, reptile skin black and red in an impossible underwater light. It feels warm to the touch.

It feels safe.

+

Raleigh Becket the second time around is everything Chuck hoped and feared he would be. He’s kind and open and grinning and also run down and scruffy, with three days of stubble on his chin. He smells of cold, dry places and his smile is off.

“So,” he says during his first dinner at the ‘dome, grinning like it’s a contest, “I heard the world’s ending.”

Sasha, who sat next to the has-been like she’s always been there, snorts. “This is no age for dragons,” she says, her accent hard on the vowels. It sounds like a quote.

Raleigh throws his head back like she made some fantastic joke, laughs. “I’ve heard that before. What’s that make us? Dragonkillers?”

“Slayers,” Herc correct with a side-eye at his son. “They’re called dragonslayers.”

Raleigh shakes his head. “They’re not dragons. Kaiju, I mean. They’re not dragons.”

Chuck makes a noise at the back of his throat, derisive. Everyone ignores it.

+

After their disastrous Drift with Becket, Mako comes stumbling out of the Conn pod with a hand to her head, looking wrecked. 

Chuck, standing to one side, sees the way she breathes, like she wants to throw up. 

Becket follows her, worried look on his face. “Hey,” he asks, “are you alright? I’m sorry I slipped, sorry I threw us out of alignment.”

She shakes her head, bravely. “No. It is not that. I chased the RABIT. But you...you were burning, Raleigh.”

And the has-been sighs like his heart is breaking and wraps his arms around Miss Mori, swallowing her up. “I’m sorry,” he says, not quite low enough for Chuck not to hear. “You were never meant to see that.”

He rocks her a bit in place, shifting their positions slightly and then he’s looking right at Chuck, eyes big and dumb and blue, except for how, for just a second, they’re not blue at all.

+

Chuck isn’t proud of it (he totally is), but he knows that he’s the one that started it. Not with fists, but calling Mako a bitch would have landed him on his ass any day and he knew it before the words left his mouth.

Maybe, maybe, he just wanted to wipe that smug little expression off of the has-beens face, wanted to see him wrecked and of balance. 

Wanted to see the fucker look the same way Chuck is pretty sure _he_ looks, every time Raleigh does something kind and sweet and brave. That asshole is a walking reminder of everything Chuck fears, everything that terrifies him, and he just grins and bears it, like it’s nothing at all. 

Like he’s _better_ than Chuck.

So Chuck calls Mako a bitch and doesn’t even try to duck the punch.

It’s as alive as he’s ever felt. 

Right up until, until, until. Until Raleigh appears out of nowhere later that night, shoving Chuck roughly into a wall, causing a banging of metal that wakes half of China. 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he hisses and it’s the first time Chuck has ever heard the asshole swear and he’s dizzy with it, with the fire coming his way. 

Raleigh’s too hot, giving off heat like a furnace and his eyes are the wrong colour, not blue anymore but something else, suddenly, inexplicably.

So he does the only thing he can. He grabs the older man by the scruff of his neck, pulls him down that one, measly inch and shoves his tongue as far down Raleigh’s fucking throat as it’ll go. 

+

Fucking the leftover Becket feels like fire and water and the smooth glide of scales.

It feels like slaying dragons.

+

“So, dragonslayer, huh?” Raleigh says, one night, lying stretched out on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Chuck jerks, tries to get away, but when Raleigh fucking Becket holds on to you, you don’t budge. It’s like the man’s made of steel, or something. (Like he wears his armour under his skin and doesn’t need Gipsy at all.)

“Relax,” he murmurs, grinning. “I didn’t go snooping. Herc told me about you, years ago. Before.”

Before. 

That’s all he ever says. Before. He hasn’t said his brother’s name even once since he got here, not even around Tendo, who was his best friend, once, apparently. 

Chuck relaxes, marginally, and wonders what he’ll do to his father for that particular indiscretion. A surround sound replay of last night the next time they Drift, maybe. 

“My Mom used to tell me stories, too, when I was a kid,” Raleigh says, just then. His arm around Chuck’s middle tightens marginally, then releases. “It was always the same story, really. Just the details changed.”

Chuck knows the other man is waiting for him to ask for the story, but it’s not bloody well happening, so Raleigh will just have to talk on his own or shut the fuck up.

Of course, he talks. 

“There was always a human who was special. Different, in some way. Someone who dreamed of impossible things. She said they dreamed of dragons.” He smiles a little, licks his lips. “And there was a dragon, who searched the world, looking for that one person. And when the dragon found their human, their stole them away.”

“For dinner?”

“For protection. For love. That human was a dragon’s treasure, its hoard. More precious than anything else in the world. And then there was always a noble knight who thought the human needed saving and came riding into the dragon’s lair with a lance and a sword, challenging the dragon to a fight.”

Raleigh rolls until his nose brushes up against Chuck’s, all cutesy. Chuck tries not to gag. (He does.)

“In my mom’s stories, the dragon always won.”

Chuck laughs and it sounds hollow, even to his own ears. “That’s not how it goes, Ray,” he says, angry and bitter because outside the walls of this room, this Shatterdome, that’s exactly how it goes.

And Raleigh, reading his damn mind, says, “Kaiju are not dragons, Chuck.”

“Fuck you.”

+

Mako and Raleigh, it turns out, are every bit as insane and destructive and _amazing_ together as Yancy and Raleigh were.

Chuck is starting to suspect that the common factor in this equation is Raleigh.

But then the world’s ending, so he’s not really thinking about that all that much. 

+

The triplets die in the Harbour. 

The Kaidanovskys climb out of the water like rising titans an hour after the fight ends, Sasha, unbowed, supporting Aleksis, who looks pale and tired. 

+

“See,” Chuck bites into the other man’s neck. “The dragons fucking lost.”

Half of Hong Kong is in ruins, but the monsters are dead and the human race gets another day. 

Fucking A.

Raleigh presses a hand to the back of Chuck’s head, tangles fingers in hair and sighs. He doesn’t argue.

+

“Does everyone know what they have to do?” the Marshall asks, hands clasped in front of him in a gesture that’s half command, half prayer. “Then let’s finish this, gentlemen, once and for all.”

He moves to stand, to go and climb into a drivesuit to commit suicide with Chuck as his co-pilot, when Raleigh says, “Wait.”

Everyone in the room, Marshall, Mori, the science freaks, Tendo and every living pilot they have left, stops. They wait for Raleigh to speak.

Instead he turns to Sasha, who hasn’t let go of her husband’s hand since Cherno went down, and says her name, softly, gently. It’s a question.

She purses her lips, thoughtful. 

“Ranger Becket,” Pentecost starts, but Raleigh actually raises a hand, cuts him off like a disobedient puppy. The Marshall shuts his mouth and Chuck can _see_ the old man counting down from ten. Mako looks between her co-pilot and her father and then at Chuck, who can only shrug. He has no fucking idea.

Finally, after what seems like forever, Sasha asks, “Why?”

And Raleigh grins, that wry aww-shucks expression he wears so well and asks, “Haven’t you heard? This is no age for dragons.”

What. The. Fuck.

He must say that out loud, because Herc cuffs him upside the head and Raleigh shoots him a smirk. 

“You know we are the last,” the Russian says, squeezing Aleksis’ hand too tightly. 

“I watched my brother die,” Raleigh agrees, like it means something. Something more than what it is. 

She nods.

“What...” Pentecost starts, but Raleigh cuts him off again. “A Second, Sir.”

“Aleksis. Sasha has taught you how to keep yourself out of the Drift, right?”

The big man nods and Chuck wonders how the fuck the has-been knows that. Knows even, that Sasha can do that. Chuck didn’t.

“So you could pilot Gipsy with Mako?”

Another nod. “Da.”

“So we have Gipsy with Alaksis and Mako, Striker with the Marshall and Chuck.”

“I notice,” Pentecost cuts in, “that you have just taken yourself completely out of the equation, Ranger.” He sounds a little homicidal. He sounds like he thinks Raleigh’s bowing out.

“Yes,” the madman agrees, complacently. “Because Sasha and I will be going in together.”

“With what Jaeger?” Herc asks.

Raleigh smiles again. “With no Jaeger at all.” Then he turns to Chuck, looks at him long and hard and says, “This is no age for dragons. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few of us left anyway.”

And the pieces click into place, stories and dreams and eyes of the wrong colour, stats that cannot possibly be right and the way Sasha said – 

“The last,” Mako breathes, awed.

Raleigh and Sasha both nod. 

“You are telling me,” the Marshall barks, “That you, and Miss Kaidanovsky are fucking _dragons_?”

Another round of nods. Newt makes a sound like he wants to cry a little. “We can clear a path for Gipsy and Striker. The Kaiju know how the Jaegers fight, but they have never faced a dragon.”

He side-eyes Chuck. “Not a real one.”

“This is completely ridiculous,” Gottlieb starts, only to be cut off by Newt’s nails digging into his forearm. “Show us!”

+

This is what Chuck sees:

Fire and water and the smooth slide of scales, the colour of a sunset.

He tastes blood in his mouth and the bitter tang of ozone and heat and smoke, of fire and dry bone.

He sees a dragon, wings spread, scales rattling, tail swinging like a pendulum and it looks like death made flesh.

All his life, he has seen that dragon.

Only this time, he’s not dreaming.

+

Raleigh takes flight on wings the colour of lava and shatters the air above the ‘dome with a screech, beckoning, calling. He gleams, even in the rain.

Sasha answers, her scales blue and green, shimmering like sunlight broken on the waves. She slithers into the water and down until she’s nothing but a suggestion of shape.

They lead the way to the last stand, Gipsy and Striker following like mechanical younger siblings, tottering in the wake of the true monsters.

Through the drift, Chuck catches a stray thought from the Marshall, more image than words, a dragon next to a Kaiju and the difference in size. No matter. Like Raleigh said, the Kaiju have never faced dragons before. They won’t know how to fight them.

That is their chance.

“This is no age for dragons,” Pentecost murmurs, and it sounds like a prayer, this time.

“We’re fucking dragonslayers,” Chuck agrees, wondering if Raleigh’s mother ever told this part of the story, the part where dragons battle dragons at the end of the fucking world. 

He knows his own certainly never did.

Chuck Hansen is not a child of the war, but he might as well be. So he takes a deep breath and turns his head enough to give Pentecost a dirty grin. 

“So let’s slay these fuckers, sir.”

+

+


End file.
